No more waking up to social media first thing. Social media. What a phrase. I open my eyes in the morning and don’t immediately see everything I missed yesterday. But I also miss the news that some friend-of-a-friend’s girlfriend’s dog is doing better after all. You wake up and there you are, at the mercy of your own body, the room, the heat, the cold, and a mind that has to find its own sense of scale. It makes me wonder.
Language is on social media, whether it wants to be or not. Marketing is language. Or does marketing just use it? Maybe all communication is already trying to convince, confirm, persuade, explain, speed things up. Marketing means selling. Selling something. Giving something away. Selling yourself. Striking a deal, grabbing, lying, cheating, showing, displaying, presenting, acquiring, learning, unlearning, pitting, an avocado, for example. Buying.
One word. Here’s another. No. That makes three. Speaking, talking, singing, whining, cursing, flattering, answering, ignoring, falling silent, staying silent, invoking. Conspiring. Unconspiring. Beguiling. You can do all of it. We do all of it. Sometimes well, sometimes not so much.
In the early 2000s, we didn’t have memes yet. We had cartoons, anime, magazines, and music television. That was where our lingo came from. Yeah, baby. Lingo! Our slang. Our own language. At one point, someone came up with a handshake. Our own greeting. It was risky. You don’t just do that, do you? Sure, skaters and punks did it in music videos. Fist to fist, palms together, left, right, razzle dazzle, thumbs up, head tilted: »What’s up?«
Could we do that too? Wait. Let’s try it. It works! This is cool. It was cool. We saw it, picked it up, made it ours. Tweaked it.
There was a whole new kind of funny: South Park. Absurd exaggeration and charming surrealism for teenagers who secretly turned the TV back on at night. Cartman, Kyle, or Kenny. That was back then. It came from somewhere else, but we made it ours. It belonged to us. We didn’t copy it. We stole it.
Music magazines, manga, Game Boys. We repurposed jokes from sitcoms, watched the same late night interviews and then discussed them together. Capitalism? Yes, but... No. I mean no, because it really was cool back then. What made its way to us was cool,... I’m leaving it at that. It’s fine.
Surveillance capitalism—runaway Big Tech capitalism—wants to steal the show. And flatten the essay while it’s at it. Get lost.
What we shared and made our own—mixtapes, catchphrases, and jokes—came from somewhere else, but it did not take our thoughts or our language away from us. That’s what I want to believe. It’s what I think.
Let me rewind a few years. Four, actually. 2022. Whenever I was bored or lost, I didn’t reach for my phone, no. It was already in my hand. And the app was open. My right thumb must have been unusually strong compared to my left back then. Up and down, left and right, page after page, icon after icon. Which app? For a few weeks it was Instagram, then IMDb. Doesn’t matter for what we’re doing here. I kept taking the apps off my home screen. Lots of little victories, I thought.
My thumb disagreed. Wait, was it my thumb or my mind? Hold on, was it »me«?
IMDb had icons too. Pretty faces, headlines, trailers, ratings, yes! Numbers, numbers! Big ones and small ones, green ones and red ones, trends and scales! Going up and down, lists, ratings! I rate, you rate, it’s good, it’s bad, it’s shit! Numbers! If even scrolling through IMDb could replace Instagram, then...? At least IMDb wasn’t Instagram. I like learning about films. Alright?
It went on like that for a while. And then it was over. My phone became just another device. Like a stove burner, a remote control, a bike dynamo. It made calls, sent messages, transferred money. It held useful archives and databases. Notes. Movie logs. Board-game research. Fun, yes. Useful too. But it was different from carrying a pocket-sized machine of self-erasure around.
I once heard that self-optimization is the carrot on the stick. There is no second carrot. Nothing else dangling behind it for us to eat. There is no getting there. The reward is the reward is the work is the work is the
compulsion is the reward, is progress is...
Look. Here’s a barrel. This barrel is an analogy. It has a bottom. A real bottom. Not a false one. No trapdoor either. That bottom is the end. It is called self-optimization, and though we never reach it, it drops a little farther every time. Naturally. It has to. Or does it?
There’s a magician somewhere on YouTube doing a trick, and someone in the comments says, »Optical illusion«. What I’m trying to say is, self-optimization, the carrot dangling from a string, the bottom sinking lower and lower... might it try to juke you? Trick you? Sleight of hand?
A good magician knows his own tricks. He can’t fall for them. He has to know where the bottom is. He can’t really saw the woman in the wooden box in half. Can he? Then again, it’s only an analogy. These analogies. Fun. Little, curious things.
Back to the point. Without the apps I could bow to, my phone was just a phone. Useful, yes. Pretty, because it was an iPhone, yes. But still just a phone. You can even cut yourself loose from every app Meta has puked out. Leave group chats. Move to a messenger built around privacy and pushing back against surveillance capitalism. You could do that.
Blasphemy! Heartless! People put a lot of work into this stuff. They carefully curate women who always seem to drop things, edit bits, ship clips. Dogs get pulled from sewer drains. With some Paijalan herb and a bit of string, you can fix a microphone. Besides, your cousin hasn’t really gone off the deep end. Those stories he shared about the old days and trains? He doesn’t mean anything by it. A matter of interpretation. Should keep an eye on it, though. Surely worth the effort.
You can’t just cut ties. We’re modern creatures in a modern world! Even politicians post their lunch online, alongside their policy, and tell us how they... No. A piece of writing has to keep some dignity.
Is this how you lose friends?
And then, just like that, something started moving. It wasn’t a river yet. More of a trickling stream. Like meltwater high in the mountains, making its way down. From another world. Leaving the peaks, running through air blue with cold. Flowing over gray stone and dark, shiny pebbles. When it had passed shopping carts vacationing in the water and ducks living there, it arrived. Down here, at the bank. It brought time. Free time. Time, suddenly free. Leisure. Boredom. Possibilities. Courage.
If you don’t go online to look at the library in Tokyo, do you go back to the one down the street? It doesn’t look as good as the one in Tokyo, no.
Kyoto used to be the capital of Japan, sort of. Because the emperor lived there. He used to reside there. That’s just Tokyo backwards. Kind of funny. See it?
Some time passed. Sun, rain, seasons. Weather, basically. The river at times a current, a pond, a wave. Water, basically. And then—back to the World Wide Web. There is no escape.
In any battle, one advantage matters more than most: the high ground. The hill. The strategic edge. Better view, more clarity, the upper hand! Cannons don’t have to fire uphill. They fire down. Arrows fly faster! Shoot them! It’s the position generals want. They take it and hold it.
I’m trying to crawl up there, and wonder: when did the world start talking like this? Why is everything either absolutely insane or brutally hopeless? Why are we relentlessly destroying the most legendary fries of our lives until we’re in a three-day-long food coma, with zero regrets, because you only live once? Eat or die? Eat and die. Weren’t we really just... out, at a food truck, eating too much because it tasted so good? Why is pain terrible, but justified once it’s cut into a ten-second clip? Do the ends justify the means? Have they always? Are we witnessing the last generation?
Abstraction. Pull language far enough away from the thing itself and it goes hollow. Then dead. All lights out. Hello, George Carlin. Shell shock!
Language gives things meaning. It tells other people what we mean, but it also tells us what we know. It carries what we think—and what we can’t think of. And so we order pizza, get pasta, and think it’s salad.
The world speaks fluent irony. Mother tongue. We preface everything with a disclaimer instead of just saying what we want, then tack on another at the end. One disclaimer is never enough. We don’t talk about ideas. We talk in references. Memes. Me too. That one time I even...
There it goes. Lost the thought. Damn. Someone once said, if a thought slips away easily, it probably wasn’t that important.
There’s a video. On a platform. YouTube. There’s a woman in it. Her name is Amy. Hippie Amy at Phish Concert. It’s the ’90s. She’s cool. Doesn’t need irony. Old-school cool. Why? She just tells you what she’s doing. Means it. People online saw it and lost their minds. That’s all it took. Why? Well, she says what she means. Tells you what she’s up to.
Amy is talking in a parking lot somewhere, perfectly at ease. She tells the camera what she’s doing. Clocks the interviewer fishing for a cheap line. Doesn’t faze her.
She’s following a band around. Why? Because she wants to. That’s it. She sells stuff she makes herself—little things, whatever—to pay for gas. So far, she hasn’t made it into a single show. Never enough for a ticket, somehow always enough for gas. She hopes to scrape together enough cash that night. Maybe finally see the band she’s been following all this time.
Big deal? It’s just a band, she says. Smiles the whole time. Looks like she’s having fun. She is.
Naturally, half the internet tried to find her. To see what she looks like now. Where she ended up. What is she like these days? How has she aged? Could she have stayed the same? Even now? Fascinating.
Maybe Amy is the part of us we grew out of. Just where did she go? And if we find her, does some of that shine rub off? Can we come away with a little of her courage? That ease?
What is it, anyway? That thing where you just say what you think and feel without bending the language. Can we still do that?
Maybe the world used to give us things, and we made a language out of them. Now the internet pulls us into its running joke and sorts us into boxes. Why does a woman in a parking lot in 1997 feel like a visitor from another civilization just because she tells us what she’s up to? It makes you wonder.
Anyway, I think it’s worth trying to stay close to what is. Not stretching
language until it pulls tight and starts to snarl. Being yourself.
People who try are remarkable.
I keep wondering why we spend a few hundred lines spewing stylized irony just to say, briefly, who we are and what we want.